I just took two university courses on computer security and internet programming. I was thinking about this the other day:
Web cache proxy servers cache popular content from servers on the web. This is useful, for example, if your company has a 1 Gbps network connection internally (including a web cache proxy server), but only a 100 Mbps connection to the internet. The web cache proxy server can serve cached content much more quickly to other computers on the local network.
Now consider TLS-encrypted connections. Can encrypted content be cached in any useful way? There's a great initiative from letsencrypt.org aiming to make all internet traffic encrypted over SSL by default. They are doing this by making it really easy, automated, and free to obtain SSL certificates for your site (starting summer 2015). Considering current yearly costs for SSL certs, FREE is really attractive.
My question is: will HTTPS traffic eventually make web cache proxy servers obsolete? If so, what toll will this take on the load of global internet traffic?
